Adaptive Wireless Mesh Networks: Surviving Weather without Sensing It

Large-scale wireless mesh networks, like the ones used as cellular back-haul, operate under circumstances, where individual links are affected by weather conditions. Reliability requirements in wireless mesh networks necessitate the ability to reconfigure the network in the face of changing environmental conditions. In this paper, we present a predictive routing protocol for wireless mesh networks, which operate at millimeter-wave bands with directional links, that uses in-network parameter prediction to make the network adaptive, as opposed to using meteorological weather information from external sources, such as weather radars. We validate our approach through simulations based on real-world weather events, observed through a network of weather radars, and comparisons with approaches that do not make use of predictions but may use the link quality as a parameter in routing decision making. Our results show that our link quality-based predictive approach can achieve throughput performance that is almost 8% better than a link quality-based routing algorithm that does not use prediction for the real weather scenario we use for our simulations.